This is what building a culture of innovation looks like

May 28, 2025

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At first glance, the scene playing out last spring inside a conference room in Port St. Lucie, Fla., might have resembled a routine exercise in human-centered design. Civil servants in the city of 250,000 pored over resident feedback on a host of local priorities, from public safety to infrastructure to arts and culture. They crafted and refined takeaways about where the city was succeeding and where it was falling short. Then, they brainstormed new ideas, asking “how might we?” questions and sketching out new solutions on pieces of posterboard.

More noteworthy than the exercise itself was who was taking part: every member of the city council and the mayor, who worked alongside department heads to incorporate resident insights into the city’s annual strategic plan. In doing so, Port St. Lucie leaders are acting on the recognition that innovation can’t be confined to standalone teams or labs if cities are to deliver the efficiency and responsiveness residents expect. As Mayor Shannon Martin, who has participated in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, explains of this approach, “In order to move our city forward, we needed to start innovating together.”

Here’s what local leaders everywhere can learn from this Florida city’s work to inject a spirit and understanding of innovation throughout its city hall.

Training employees in the basics from day one.

From their very first day on the job, civil servants in Port St. Lucie are encouraged to think of themselves as having the potential to improve how their city works. “I tell each one of them at orientation that ‘everyone can be an innovator,’ explains Kate Parmelee, who serves as deputy city manager for strategic initiatives and innovation. To help make Parmelee’s words a reality, the city regularly holds what it calls an Innovation Academy, where staff learn how foundational techniques like process mapping can help them work more efficiently. Standout academy participants are then recruited to serve as innovation liaisons throughout the organization. One liaison, for example, recently used evaluation skills learned in the academy to recommend a more strategic approach to procurement around traffic data that is expected to save the city tens of thousands of dollars.

The end goal is crystal clear: making city services more effective and efficient by tapping into every civil servant’s talents and ideas for how to get there. “Part of it is just giving the team tools, but it’s also about giving them permission to do things differently,” Parmelee explains.

Using strategic planning as a lever for culture change.

It’s one thing to incorporate basic building blocks of innovation into city teams’ day-to-day. It’s another to embed these tools into the city’s process for crafting its strategic plan, which spells out goals, initiatives, and projects that guide budget allocations. By doing both, Port St. Lucie is helping ensure innovation is not only driving one-off efforts, but seeping into virtually everything the city does in the short- and long term.

That starts with residents themselves, who are invited to the city’s award-winning IamPSL citizen summits. There, they take part in interactive activities including booths aligned with the city’s priorities, selfie stations, and other entertainment designed to elicit insight into how the city can better meet their needs. It’s an approach that was recently replicated by Columbia, Mo., after leaders from both cities met as part of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.

Innovation 5/21 — Mayor Shannon Martin, center, decided it was crucial that the city council take part in the innovation process in Port St. Lucie. Photo courtesy of City of Port St. Lucie

But city leaders in Port St. Lucie also saw an opportunity to engage a broader city hall team to both analyze the insights collected at these citizen summits and connect them to practical solutions.

That’s why the city identifies strategic-plan project managers from each department and offers them training in the nuts and bolts outlined in the Path to Public Innovation Playbook from the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University. Then, after instruction in everything from problem framing to data analysis to prototyping, these project managers guide their own teams to examine how department-level priorities might evolve—and to explore new initiatives to support that evolution.

For example, staff in the Public Works department recognized that residents were increasingly concerned about the lack of shade in Port St. Lucie. So they proposed a suite of interventions, modeled after an effort in Phoenix to plant 27,000 trees and build 550 shade structures, and a sales tax structure (which is being tested in resident surveys) to help bring it to life. To Parmelee, this is an example of civil servants anticipating residents' needs and being ambitious about how to tackle them.

Inviting elected officials into the process.

To fully embed innovation into how the city operates, Mayor Martin knew she needed to engage the city council, too. And the best way to do that, she and the city's other leaders concluded, was again through the strategic-planning process and, specifically, the point in that process when city council members interpret resident feedback.

“In the past, I would deliver a PowerPoint presentation to the council,” Parmelee says. “I would say, ‘Here's your data on what residents think. What do you want to do with it?” What followed was a council-driven planning process that, while often including consultation with agency heads, was too formal to encourage candid input from people actually delivering services, according to Council Member David Pickett. "You could tell that, for a lot of them, they weren't comfortable speaking their mind," he says.

So last year, the city started taking a more hands-on, collaborative approach. That included agency heads and council members breaking off into groups of five or six to explore the resident input together and then, using Post-it notes, markers, and scissors, create “so-what” scrapbooks to underscore key takeaways. These groups then moved into ideation, sketching rapid prototypes of potential solutions—including everything from a performing arts cultural center to a mobile city hall that delivered essential services in neighborhoods. Throughout the process, group members asked each other questions that will be familiar to innovators everywhere: What do you like about this idea? How can we improve this? What are the obstacles to getting this done?

It was in one of those conversations that Councilman Pickett says he became aware of how the city could use artificial intelligence to further improve traffic management. “That was the first time I’d heard about” the technology having that sort of potential, he says. The city’s strategic plan now places a priority on tapping AI to improve core service delivery, an addition that Pickett attributes to agency heads opening up council members’ minds to that opportunity. And the city is using this same method of all-hands-on-deck innovation to place a long-term emphasis on green infrastructure with an initiative called NaturallyPSL. It features a portfolio of solutions such as “buzz stops”—which are pollinator gardens at bus stops—several new parks, the designation of over 700 acres of local land as green space, and more.

Of course, it hasn’t been easy to make such foundational changes to the city’s ways of working. A larger group of city leaders weighing in at length—and in detail—on the strategic plan has, at moments, made it more difficult to achieve consensus. And there’s naturally an adjustment period when council members are asked to spend a day diving into group exercises that may be unfamiliar to them.

But for Mayor Martin, the key lesson out of all of it is simple: When cities invite every civil servant and elected official into the innovation process, the potential for impact skyrockets. That’s why the city council, mayor, and department leaders did their human-centered strategic planning exercise all over again earlier this month.

“We all share the same goal of putting residents first. That is our top priority,” Martin says. “But we can’t do that if we’re not operating off the same sheet of music together.”